


lusus naturae

by fenying



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Assassination Attempt(s), Friends to Enemies, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Morally Ambiguous Character, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:01:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22842169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenying/pseuds/fenying
Summary: There are only two people in this story that matter, and the second has just stepped onstage.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Na Jaemin
Comments: 26
Kudos: 52
Collections: WIP OLYMPICS: WINTER 2019/20





	lusus naturae

**Author's Note:**

  * For [haesuns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/haesuns/gifts), [incendiarism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendiarism/gifts), [boyeater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boyeater/gifts), [octie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/octie/gifts).



> this is a gift to the league of unhinged nahyuckists! it is not an induction—i do not think this really qualifies as unhinged and i also don't know what the hell it's supposed to be—but it sort of hits on the power rush feeling i was talking about.

It’s a visceral shudder that wracks his body when the chainlinks of power surrounding the castle shift—just slightly, almost imperceptibly enough that anyone less familiar with this particular magic signature wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Fortunately enough—or maybe unfortunately, considering how _long_ this has been dragging on—he is _intimately_ familiar with this one.

Smile of knives, eyes alight. “He’s here,” Jaemin announces to absolutely no one. But it's alright, really.

There are only two people in this story that matter, and the second has just stepped onstage.

☀

Perhaps there is something wrong with the fact that he only feels alive when he is closest to dying. Jaemin wouldn’t know. This is how he’s lived his entire life, and throwing away a compass is so much easier than trying to get the metals to realign.

Anticipation crawls along his skin, sinks its wiry claws into his throat. He checks for the knives hidden along his person, takes them out, swaps their positions, slides them into the right sheaths and then the wrong ones until he has three tiny blades in his coat pocket, a dirk in his right boot, and a cleaver in both hands. He hurls one at the opposite wall, waiting for it to bury itself in with a gratifying _thud._

It doesn’t—there’s a ripple in the air right before it hits, and the blade ends up nicking the wall half a centimeter from where it should’ve landed. Soundless.

Jaemin narrows his eyes. He’s more behind than he thought—or maybe Donghyuck is just ahead.

☀

Jaemin dreams of a bathtub filled with kerosene and a single match. Jaemin dreams of a rusty cage and ankle chains at the bottom of a lagoon. Jaemin dreams of maces, of morningstars, of crossbows and spears and halberds and axes, but mostly he dreams of knives.

He dreams of the day Donghyuck returns to metal.

☀

The balmy summer sun is a pleasant simmering heat on his skin. Jaemin dips his toes into the still waters of the palace pool, slapping the sole of his foot on the surface so that some of the spray hits Donghyuck. Donghyuck screws up his face.

There’s cotton in his head. He leans back onto his hands, kicking lazily in the water. They’re playing “what would you do?”, a game that Donghyuck finds no pleasure in, and Jaemin finds so much pleasure in. Donghyuck’s answer is always the same, but Jaemin loves testing him—coming up with the most ridiculous scenarios in search of his breaking point. So far, he hasn’t found it yet.

“What would you do if I poisoned the water supply of one of the provinces?” asks Jaemin, syllables rolling off his tongue as light as air. Just a thought.

“I’d protect you,” answers Donghyuck.

“What would you do if I razed your hometown to the ground and burnt everyone inside to death?”

“I’d protect you.”

“If I cut out your tongue?”

“I’d protect you.”

“If I killed your sister?”

“I’d protect you.”

Donghyuck is just waiting for him to get bored, he knows. This is how it goes—Jaemin exhausts himself asking questions, and Donghyuck never once gives a different answer. This is how it always goes—except, wait. Jaemin sits up.

“What would you do,” he asks, smiling, “if I became my mother?” A shift in focus—Jaemin, self-centered as he is, has never thought to ask about himself before. Now he’s curious.

Donghyuck’s expression is sunnily neutral. “I’d kill you,” he says, in the same mild tone as before.

Jaemin throws his head back and laughs, hard, because he knows Donghyuck isn’t joking.

☀

The scores of things he did or didn’t do don’t matter. What does matter is that he did the one thing he swore he never would, and now Donghyuck has spent the last five years trying to make him pay for it.

Jaemin relishes it.

☀

Last time was poison—definitely not Donghyuck’s style, and all around a bad showing. The time before that isn’t even worth mentioning.

The game is stalling. For whatever reason, Donghyuck is losing his edge, and Jaemin is losing his patience. So this is it, really—the last chance Jaemin will give Donghyuck to really try and kill him before he takes matters into his own hands.

☀

Jaemin strides out of the throne room, steps slow and measured. It is only a matter of time—in the absence of any signs of life, the halls ring with the phantom _tick-tock_ of a grandfather clock. _Tick_ , step. _Tock_ , step.

The wallpaper is peeling—a derelict castle to house a decrepit heart. It’s decaying, rotten flesh. Sometimes Jaemin thinks about how satisfying it would be to set a match to the whole thing and watch it burn. Sometimes he craves that sense of finality.

But the game must go on.

It’s sheer relief, over anything else, when little blue flames start to lick at the crown moulding on the ceiling, trailing down the walls and tracing out little shapes. They leave no smoke or scarring. Jaemin passes a finger through one of the flames and brings his hand away unscathed, if slightly warm. A warning, then.

He continues his stroll down the corridor. _Tick_ , step. _Tock_ , step.

☀

The soft crackling of the flames belie how quickly they grow to sweltering heats, coaxing—ordering—him along. Jaemin resists every urge to speed up his pace. He knows where they’re pushing him to go, and he’ll take his damn sweet time getting there.

☀

Five years ago was the first time Donghyuck spent the night in his bedchamber. Jaemin remembers.

Kisses blooming hot on his skin, leaving scars of emotions Jaemin hadn’t known how to decipher at the time, but knew now to be anger. Desperation. Any feeling that might’ve tended towards love turned ugly and purged out, kiss by kiss. It was the first time Donghyuck let Jaemin tease him to pieces, break him apart and put him back together again. It was the first time Jaemin let Donghyuck hold him so closely, giving him something so fragile and trusting he wouldn’t crush it in his hands.

Five years ago was the last time Donghyuck spent the night in his bedchamber.

When he’d woken up, the first rays of sunlight dancing along the ridge of his cheekbones, Donghyuck was gone. He’d left nothing but a knife behind, unsheathed and lying in the imprint of where his body had been the night before. Wicked steel edge, sharp enough to cut bone, swathed in fine silk sheets.

A farewell. An oath.

Jaemin remembers.

☀

Sweat slips down Jaemin’s back as the walls char, devoured by the ever-growing flames. Stone and wood are reduced into ashes. The disintegration process is mesmerizing—Jaemin stops to watch, for a minute, before the flames grow impatient and roar at him again.

☀

Everything is ablaze. Door frames fall apart as he walks through them. He’s struck with the sudden urge to grab a chunk of ash and watch it fully crumble apart in his hands. Ephemeral, just like most things.

Ghostly song wafts through the empty space, in the remaining breath Jaemin has to take before the fire eats up the rest of it. He crosses the threshold of his own bedchamber, watching with practiced ambivalence as the curtains burn away from the bottom up. The gold paint peels away from the rods.

He takes a deep breath, sucking in the smoke and reveling in the dizziness it brings. Pleasant, lethargic heat washes over his bones.

To contrast, a knife at his neck. Cruel frigidity.

Slowly, the corners of his lips curl up.

“Nice to see you again, darling.”

☀

Donghyuck presses the blade into the skin of his throat, hard enough to draw blood but not enough to do much else. Jaemin’s heart jumps. This is supposed to be a game for Donghyuck as much as it is for Jaemin, but it’s been so long since he’s felt like an actual player. His blood sings at the thought.

“I can’t exactly say the same,” whispers Donghyuck, soft sussurra drowning out the groaning flames. “ _Dear._ ”

“I’m perfectly delightful,” insists Jaemin, sliding out the little knife concealed inside his shirt sleeve. He allows for a pause, a quarter rest in the flurry of descending chromatic scales—“Still trying to figure out what to do with me, are you?”—before plunging the blade into Donghyuck’s thigh.

And this is the thing about Donghyuck that’s absolutely infuriating. His grip on the knife at Jaemin’s throat loosens just enough for Jaemin to push his way out, sure, but he never screams or anything, _god._ The most Jaemin can ever elicit from him is near-silent hisses. It’s like Donghyuck’s intentionally trying to rob him of the satisfaction.

They stand at a momentary impasse—one without a knife in his hand, one with a knife in his leg. Watching, waiting for the other to move first. Reactive.

But that’s Donghyuck’s style. Jaemin’s always been more impatient, so he gives in first.

In the time it takes for Jaemin to draw both daggers from the sheaths strapped to his pants, Donghyuck is already running.

Jaemin sidesteps the vase Donghyuck throws at him, but not fast enough—it shatters on his shoulder, dragging shallow cuts through the thin lining of his shirt and into his skin. With it comes droplets of water and two dead flowers. Jaemin’s amazed they hadn’t burnt up yet, honestly.

He slashes through two pillows thrown at his face, stumbling when a third one hits him in the stomach. A roll of pencils, a desk drawer, his own sleep clothes—Jaemin narrows his eyes. Donghyuck is trying to buy time, which isn’t anything like he thought this would go. He clicks his tongue, displeased.

Donghyuck cuts off a strip of the bedsheets, swiftly pulling the knife out of his leg and wrapping the fabric around the wound. A quick knot—one yank, two. Jaemin doesn’t recognize this Donghyuck—a Donghyuck concerned with self-preservation. This Donghyuck now has something to lose.

Jaemin grins with a mouth of ivory icicles. That just makes things more fun, doesn’t it?

He lunges.

Donghyuck parries his first stab with a short staff, twisting the blade out of his grasp. The fact that he’s not mirroring Jaemin’s dual wield is even more telling. Jaemin grits his teeth. Eyes flicking between Donghyuck and the knife on the floor, he decides that knives are disposable, but chances are not. It’s not like he’s unarmed.

Hammer to icepick, he goes for the face. The tip of the dagger meets its mark, ripping open Donghyuck’s cheek. Perfect skin, perfectly marred.

Donghyuck snarls and lands a boot in Jaemin’s stomach, kicking the knife he’d dropped earlier just out reach. Jaemin hits the wall, shirt sleeve catching on fire. Red tinges the edges of the fabric where he cuts it off.

 _Here we go, here we go._ He swings out for Donghyuck’s shoulder this time, not ready to let the game end so soon—and perhaps it is his mistake that he underestimates Donghyuck’s competence as a player. Donghyuck smacks him down on the shoulder with his staff. Metal flashes by Jaemin’s eyes, headed home for his neck.

Jaemin gracelessly thrusts upward, vindicated when his dagger snags Donghyuck’s side. So far, it’s 2-0, and Donghyuck is losing again—until he digs his knife into Jaemin’s wrist and slams him into one of the burning posts of his four-poster bed.

Searing heat runs up Jaemin’s spine, blister burns blooming like flowers across his back. His hand slackens—the knife clatters onto the floor, and Donghyuck kicks it away. He twists the one embedded in Jaemin’s wrist, carving cruel whorls into his tendons. Jaemin bites back a scream.

Fight to kill, fight to _hurt_. Jaemin knees Donghyuck in the chest, giving himself more room. With Donghyuck, like this, it’s—it’s dizzying. Intoxicating. Jaemin’s vision runs blurry at the edges and the smoke fills his lungs, coating ash along constricted airways. He tears the knife out of his wrist and relishes the throbbing crimson dribbling down his arm, the fading feeling at the tips of his fingers.

Icepick to hammer. He reaches out for an ending, one last time.

Like a magnet, cunning iron drawn to flesh—to the soft skin of his stomach, to the blood and bone and _life_ behind it, the life that he yearns to see spill out over his hands, _burns_ for it— he can already imagine it, blade sinking in, burying itself up to the hilt in Donghyuck’s soft body—

Donghyuck knocks the dagger out of his hand, knocks him under the chin with that pesky wooden staff. Jaemin stumbles back, knees meeting bedframe and buckling.

Shoving him onto the bed, Donghyuck presses a knee down on his stomach. Jaemin lands with the air knocked out of his lungs, luxurious silk cushioning his fall. He’d dreamed of Donghyuck’s return to metal, but this—this is even better.

Donghyuck closes his hands around Jaemin’s throat. Jaemin pinches the underside of his arm, _hard_.

Fire spreads to the canopy as Jaemin struggles for an edge, Donghyuck’s breath hot on his face. Everything is warm—too warm. Jaemin kicks up the blankets, pushing Donghyuck off the side of the bed. One more knife, a little thing coated in belladonna and pressed flat against his lower back, begs to come out and play, and so he obliges.

Or tries to. Donghyuck flings a pillow in his face just as Jaemin’s about to lean over and stab him, digging his nails into Jaemin’s leg to haul himself back on the bed.

He grabs Jaemin’s wrists and pins them above his head, holding his hips in place with his knees. Jaemin bucks his hips up—wildly, pulling from the last reserves of his strength like a cornered animal. Adrenaline bleeds out his open wounds, staining the sheets. He hasn’t lost yet. All the knives are accounted for—two by the door, one by the window, one under the bed— _under the bed—_

One under his chin, tip covered in his own blood. Donghyuck’s eyes shine with an ice Jaemin hasn’t seen in a long time—quite a pretty picture in complement to the immolation of his bedchamber.

Jaemin falls still, heart rate slowing. Donghyuck presses down with his hips, forcing Jaemin’s head up with the point of the knife. “Don’t you look pretty like this,” he croons.

Nestled in fine silk, pillars of fire on all four sides, pinned to a bed by a boy with a knife—perhaps this isn’t a bad way to go. If he had any intention of going, that is. The smell of their exertion blends with the smoke into a heady mixture. Jaemin breathes in, out.

The last patches of the fabric canopy burn to a crisp. Jaemin watches the flames finally start to lick along the edges of the blankets. White-blue hot, a pretty contrast to pale pink sheets. Donghyuck shoves him into the mattress, bared-teeth smile stretched out wide like a marionette’s.

“Game over, darling,” he murmurs, easing the knife upwards until the tip splits skin open.

Jaemin smiles. “Not quite,” he breathes, so quiet Donghyuck has to lower his head to hear him over the steadily encroaching flames.

All knives are accounted for—including the one strapped to the back of his calf.

☀

Donghyuck’s expression is sunnily neutral. “I’d kill you,” he says, in the same mild tone as before.

Jaemin throws his head back and laughs, hard.

“Not if I kill you first.”


End file.
